Auditing generally involves comparing a set of requirements against a set of actual data in order to determine whether the data complies with the requirements or how much progress has been made toward a desired objective defined by the requirements. As such, an audit can provide valuable information, so that the auditor may take active steps toward correcting any deficiencies reflected in the data.
Audits can be particularly useful in environments that are requirement-intensive. The educational system is one such environment. Students must meet certain academic requirements in order to progress from one level to another and ultimately to graduate. So, it is helpful to the student to gauge her progress as she advances in the institution. For this reason, several systems have been developed to perform degree audits for university students.
These systems typically provide reports to administrators, academic advisors, and students regarding the students' progress toward a degree. Such reports may include the necessary courses a student has remaining in order to complete a degree or any prerequisites and corequisites that a student must take during a calendar year, for example. Additionally, students may engage in “what if” audits to determine the students' progress toward a different degree. Universities use these systems to proactively manage the students' curricula.
There are shortcomings associated with these degree audit systems, however. First, these systems are narrowly designed for only degree audits and are not reconfigurable to handle other types of audits. For example, degree audit systems do not have routines in place that allow for different system inputs, even though there are a variety of activities, events, and organizations within the educational environment, having certain requirements which must be met, that could benefit from inclusion in such audit systems. Second, even if an audit system could be reconfigured to perform different types of audits, the effort and expense to do so could be prohibitively high. For example, a processor could be required to create an entire new set of requirements, new procedures, and new data structures for the new system, which could be time- and labor-intensive.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for systems that are flexible enough to provide different types of audit processes and to reuse audit requirements between the different audit types.